Overwatch Line Of Sight Guide – More Eliminations, Less Deaths | OverwatchDojo

Hey there! Have you ever played a match where you felt like you get no healing and get picked too quickly? Or the other way, felt like you can not do your job with your chosen hero? Establishing the line of sight and making sure that you are visible to your supports and see your enemies is an important concept in Overwatch. Let’s get to the details! Hello guys, welcome to the dojo! This guide is indeed about making sure that you see your enemies and that your supports see you. While it sounds trivial, lots of players don’t think about this aspect of the game, and this video is here to help you make a habit of thinking about your positioning while in-game. A LoS is an imaginary line going from the camera to an arbitrary point on the map. We are going to use this simple model for example concepts in this video. There is an in game setting called Field Of View that can affect your LOS. The wider the field of view, the more you can see on your screen. We recommend to keep this value on the highest setting, as you can use the extra information to see enemies that are not visible on lower settings.

Information is power. Now that we have the basics down, you’re going to ask “what does LoS have to do with our games ?”. The answer is simple, everything. Aiming is based on LoS, most abilities check LoS before having an impact in the game. You mostly only know about enemies in your LOS, and we could continue. Here is a list of LoS based abilities : All primary and secondary fire from every hero (except Winston and Reinhardt, because if your FoV is lower than 90, you’ll still hit players you don’t see. Apart from that some projectile heroes like Junkrat, Hanzo, Mei and Torbjorn) Roadhog’s hook Mei’s Ultimate Zenyatta’s orbs of Discord and Harmony Sombra’s Hack Soldier’s Biotic Field Zarya’s Projected Barrier Lucio’s Auras Mercy’s beams These abilities will only have an effect if you have your los on the target, or you could have your LOS on them, meaning there are no obstacles between.

Keeping the line of sight with your team So let’s discuss the importance of making sure that your team can see you (or so to say, keeping the line of sight with them). When an engage is happening we tend to forget where we are and concentrate solely on trying to do our job. The best example is when a Winston starts an engage with a dive composition, but he jumps too far away. If he lands in a place where the line of sight is broken he is as good as dead. So you may get into situations where you feel you don’t get the necessary support from your team.

But if you review the game and pay attention to the details, you may find that you broke the line of sight somehow and this made it easy for the enemy team to kill you quickly. A lot of times players tend to be too aggressive and die a lot or too passive and fail to do their job. Most often you will be in a team that has both types of players. The aggressive player is going to go down quickly due to the lack of sustain. For example a Genji who is flanking the enemy team and moves behind walls will not be able to get any heals from an Ana in the team.

Therefore if you are an aggressive type of player, you always need to consider if you are safe to engage where you are planning to do so. Of course sometimes it is worth the risk to break the line of sight and dive in the enemy team to kill a high priority target like a Mercy. But in most cases it is better to make sure everyone sees everyone and avoid situations where the LOS is broken. You may think that this concept is only useful for supports and DPS characters. Wrong. Imagine a Reinhardt playing in the frontline. If he decides to start chasing the enemy team and goes too far ahead or behind a corner, he is breaking the LOS with the supports and the enemy team will be able to punish him for this mistake. Hope you get the idea. The takeaway is that you need to be aware of your team’s line of sights to be able to combo well and have the biggest impact as a team. You need to make engages keeping the current composition and the need for continuous LOS in mind. Don’t dive to a place where your healers won’t be able to see you.

Don’t charge under the enemy shield, or the supports won’t be able to help you. Let’s talk about how to position yourself with different heroes for maximum effectiveness. For supports, you always want to make sure to position behind your team to somewhere safe. Be prepared to move around a bit to be able to see your frontline and help them. To do your job, you need to make sure you can see all friendlies who may need help. If the team is tearing apart and running around headlessly, you won’t be able to support them. It’s good to tell them this, to call it in the team chat. Ask them to stay together a bit more and to always make sure that they are not engaging to blind spots. This can help your overall presence in the game, as you will have more buddies to support. For frontliners, and off-tanks you always need to consider who you are protecting.

Your job is usually to either shield your team with deathball comps or create a distraction with dive comps. In both cases, you are the one soaking most of the initial damage for your team. Your job is to make sure that your DPS can do their job. Shields are creating space for your team that they can use to engage and kill enemies. When you are done protecting, you may want to get into the fight. You need to pay attention to keep the LOS with the supports, so they are able to help you in the midsts of the opposing team. For non-flanker DPS heroes, you want to stay behind your frontliner and make sure to either have a shield to protect you or the tank’s body to shield you from harm. This way you can do your job – that is doing damage – without the enemy being able to damage you freely. The most important thing is to always make sure there is somebody beefier than you in the front line and use them for protection. If you wander off and don’t see your tanks any more, you are going to go down quickly in most cases.

Of course sometimes there are better positions than behind the tanks, these are special cases. For flanker DPS, you need to make sure to periodically have the LOS with your supports. This means that you go in, do your worst and get to a position where you can heal up quickly. You are not made for prolonged fights in between many enemies. Now that these concepts are clear, we can move on and see some good and bad examples of positioning, where the importance of keeping the LOS can be seen clearly. So, it is important to make sure you keep the LOS with your target and break it for everyone else in the enemy team. It will help you with your positioning if you start thinking like this. We are using a very simple LOS model in the following example to help you understand the basics. Imagine all characters to have a line coming from their head and going towards infinity in the direction where they face. This is the LOS for the given character. You want to make sure that while you are doing your job with your hero – for example trying to get a pick with Widowmaker or trying to put an orb of discord on the key target – you think about these lines.

They are more like cones in reality, but this model is a good starting point. Decide which teammate should be seeing you, which enemy should you be seeing and which enemy you want to be hidden from. The optimal position is when you can see your target and only the target is able to see you and no one else. This scenario won’t usually happen in a live game though, but this is what we are aiming for. So using this knowledge, let’s see some examples to make sure you can use this newly learned insight in your games. The first example is King’s Row first point, on attack. You are playing Widowmaker, and the others in your team are Zenyatta, Mercy, Pharah, Genji, and Winston. The enemy team has a single Ana for heals and running Thorbjorn, Symmetra, Soldier, Reinhardt, and Zarya. When you engage, you want to get into a position where you get a clear idea of the enemy team comp. Soldier, Thorbjorn and Ana are the ones who can harm you, and you want to eliminate the highest priority target which is Ana in this case, the single healer. So you now need to think where to position yourself with the grapple to preferably break the LOS of the Soldier and establish it with the Ana.

You wait for the Winston to engage, grapple to the top of the building on the right and get a clean shot on the Ana playing around the arc. By planning your engage like this, you can get into favorable positions and don’t just have to rely on random factors to help you winning your games. Try to outsmart the enemy, and hit them where it hurts the most.

Let’s see the same engage from Winston’s perspective. Winston is gaining intel then decides to jump the Soldier to keep him busy and allow the Pharah and the Widowmaker to do damage as they like. However Winston needs to consider how long he can stay on the Soldier. If Ana and Zenyatta have a clear LOS on him, he is going to be able to stay there longer and even dance a little around the shield. If the Soldier is on the high ground where it is hard to see the Winston for the attacker’s supports, he needs to be careful with the distraction, not to let the Soldier come under the shield and get killed too quickly. Winston can also use the shield in this situation to break the LOS of the enemy support on the Soldier.

This way the Soldier won’t be able to receive heals and has to either risk the 1v1 with the Winston or flee. Winston’s team can use this to their advantage. Alright, so these were the examples that should make it clear why it is important to keep LOS in your mind when you are choosing a position to defend or a route to engage from. Feel free to join the Overwatchdojo discord server if you have any questions regarding this topic or anything else Overwatch related, click the card now, or the link in the description. Okay, now we know the basics, but the concept of keeping and breaking the line of sight has an advanced usage as well. You can use certain abilities to create situations where the LOS is broken between key targets and supports and abuse it for your advantage.

The best example is again Winston, whose bread and butter is his shield. This shield is the best tool for breaking LOS of the enemy team when used well. In the previous example, Winston could jump on the main DPS and shield around himself to deny healing from the enemy Ana and protect himself in the same time. If Winston can coordinate with flankers, they can use this to quickly go in, kill the target and work their way through the enemy team. When you are using the concept of body blocking – standing between your protected target and the enemy to eat some damage for them – you are basically breaking the LOS of the enemy to help your teammate. The tanks in Overwatch use this concept a lot to save teammates and play around enemies.

You are dancing in front of the one you are protecting, making sure that they can sneak in those few extra shots without having to worry about getting killed quickly. This of course works the other way around too. You can stand between your target and their healers to make sure they are not getting the necessary support to stay alive. This is risky, but usually doable if your healers help you.

We hope that you found this topic interesting and that you can use the knowledge learned here to improve your game. If you like what we are doing, like, comment, share, and subscribe to notifications by clicking that bell icon! ! We are waiting for you on our Discord. See you guys in the next one !.